The web is a great place to advertise yourself, or your product, via video. But in this day and age to get the most out of your videos you sometimes need to think a little more outside the box.

With the amount of videos already online yours needs to stand out, and more importantly, be memorable. This is where the concept of viral videos comes in.

These are web videos that have huge amounts of views due to it being shared thousands, and sometimes, millions of times between viewers. More often than not these are just home videos of mischievous cats and laughing babies, however, there’s a large proportion of viral videos that are actually subtle advertisements, only masked by something entertaining or intriguing that the viewers will feel happy to watch.

Your video needs to be something short and sweet. Something that mass internet users will want to search out to watch, rather than you showing it to them.

And by including subtle hints to you or your product in the video (e.g. product placement) you have yourself an advertisement where the viewers do all the leg work.

This may seem like a genius idea, however, it’s incredibly difficult to predict whether a video will go viral, no matter how good the video. The trick is to simply create a video that’s share worthy, entertaining, and memorable.

Companies around the world have used this method, and to great success. Here’s one of the more popular examples below: